Beginning on Wednesday, the public will be granted full access to a collection of letters, writings and personal notes penned by Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks with the opening of the Rosa Parks Collection at the Library of Congress.

In addition to the approximately 7,500 manuscripts that will be on display, there will be about 2,500 photographs that give visitors an inside look into the life of the late African American activist. The collection also reveals Parks did more than ignite the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in the Jim Crow South. Instead, it shows she had a strong presence in the fight to end segregation during the civil rights era and even stood behind more radical tactics pushed by Malcolm X.

"I think it's one of the first times we're actually able to read her voice, and it just totally goes against this image of the quiet seamstress," said Margaret McAleer, an archivist at the library, according to The Associated Press. "Her writings are phenomenally powerful."

"I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn't take it anymore," wrote Parks in regard to the defining moment in history when she taken off a public bus in handcuffs. "When I asked the policeman why we had to be pushed around, he said he didn't know. 'The law is the law. You are under arrest.' I didn't resist."

According to library historian Adrienne Cannon, the Parks' archive provides scholars and the public with a fuller sense of her faith, personality and personal struggles.

"It's important because we see Rosa Parks in a kind of almost frozen, iconic image -- a hero that is not really real flesh and blood," Cannon said. "Here we get a sense of a woman that is really full flesh and blood."

Other artifacts displayed in the collection include her Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Bible she kept in her pocket and a postcard signed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

For years, a long legal battle between her heirs and friends had kept the archive material shielded away from public view. However, in August 2014, philanthropist Howard Buffett, the son of billionaire Warren Buffet, bought the collection at an auction for $4.5 million. He then placed it on long-term loan at the national library.

"This is a massive body of material that really traced Mrs. Parks life in a way that you rarely find," said Alan Ettinger, president of Guernsey's Auctioneers & Brokers, who oversaw the sale.

"Most compelling were hundreds of pages, long hand, written by her starting at age 12, when she perceived the injustices around her, felt by her family and friends and set out to make change," Ettinger told NBC News.

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